PIE IN THE SKY:Johan Santana gets hit with a whipped-cream pie from Justin Turner after finishing off a no-hitter Friday night that was rich with the kind of delectable subplots only baseball can provide. Photo: Neil Miller

The true magic of a no-hitter is about more than the achievement — as spectacular as that is.

It is about the journey, the back story, and how that elevates the achievement. Baseball — more than any other of our sports — comes with context, such is the rich written and oral history of the game.

So we recognize what Jim Abbott overcame physically to simply be pitching on Sept. 4, 1993. We had the dots connected from Oct. 8, 1956, to July 18, 1999, when David Cone perfect-gamed the Expos on a day that began with Don Larsen throwing the ceremonial first pitch to Yogi Berra on Berra’s Day at Yankee Stadium. And we knew Dwight Gooden carried more than a baseball to the mound on May 14, 1996.

For me, Gooden’s had been the no-hitter with the most angles, the greatest I-can’t-believe-this-just-happened atmosphere.

He had not pitched in 1995 after a drug suspension. He was nearly released for pitching brutally in April 1996. His rotation spot was only saved because his best friend on the team, Cone, had developed an aneurysm near his shoulder. Cone was in a New York hospital on May 14 still recovering from surgery. Gooden’s father, Dan, was in a Tampa hospital readying for open-heart surgery the next morning. With all of that on his ledger and mind, Gooden held the most-feared offense in the majors — the Mariners of Griffey, A-Rod and Edgar — without a hit.

Now I have to push Gooden’s no-no into, at best, 1-A status because Johan Santana’s no-hitter was so rich with subplots that manager Terry Collins turned to pitching coach Dan Warthen in the ninth inning Friday night and said, “This is a movie.”

It is possible, however, that even the sappiest production company in Hollywood wouldn’t touch this one, such was the beyond-Rocky feel of it all. As David Wright said, “There was not one storyline. Where do I even begin?”

He then reeled off Carlos Beltran’s return, that St. Louis is the defending champs, that Queens-raised Mets fan Mike Baxter’s running-into-the-wall catch robbed a hit from Yadier Molina, who broke the Mets’ hearts with the go-ahead homer in NLCS Game 7 in 2006. And, of course, he was burying the lead items.

This is baseball. So we knew the big stuff. We knew the Mets had gone half a century — 8,019 games to be precise — without a no-hitter. It was the incurable, nagging toothache of this organization, made more painful by the fact that seven ex-Mets had thrown no-nos elsewhere, including Gooden and Cone for the hated Yankees.

And we knew Santana, like Gooden, had missed a whole season, his precious left shoulder enduring a surgery from which no pitcher had ever returned to work at a high level. This is why the Mets had babied him so. They needed him to defy those odds. He was not only the highest-paid player on a team with a shrinking payroll, but his presence had the ability to mentally and physically elevate the roster.

Literally, the first thing Collins said to me in spring, after hello, was, “The main focus of this camp is the left-hander. … If he is healthy, the dynamic of our team changes because he takes the heat off of so many others.”

Because this is baseball, we knew all of this and, thus, we were there in the dugout agonizing with Collins on Friday night. We knew these two main storylines were now at war: Was it worth jeopardizing Santana’s health by pushing his pitch count higher, higher, higher than it had ever been, even pre-surgery, all to make the toothache go away forever? Collins, his humanity and honesty on full display, admitted the next day there were parts of him hoping the Cardinals would get a hit, part of him regretting a decision he said “went against everything I stand for.”

He invested in Santana, appreciated what the moment meant for a man, a roster, a franchise, a fan base, a city. He calculated the dread of losing his most important player if the wear-and-tear of this single event cost Santana weeks or months against the electricity in the stands, the potential benefit to psyches and hearts in his clubhouse, the uplift to the organization.

He fought back tears and common sense, and so did we. It is baseball. We knew the context. So when Johan Santana threw his 134th and final pitch Friday the moment was magical because there were no hits and seemingly never-ending storylines.